In these avenues American eccentricity has been allowed free play. The houses are built in all imaginable styles of architecture: some of them are Florentine, some English, others Moorish, others a mixture of all three; others, again, look like Greek temples, whilst here and there you come across what looks like a little Gothic church, and close alongside mediæval castles in miniature, or an imitation of mosques; some have the look of villas in the Paris suburbs; some have been modelled upon Swiss châlets, others upon the residence of some pacha on the borders of the Bosphorus. There are styles for all tastes.
The American may be eccentric, or what you will, but he is never monotonous.
Enter one of these houses, and you will see handsome furniture, not only rich, but in good taste.
Riches beget the taste for literature and the arts; perhaps one day it will beget the taste for simplicity. I was not astonished to find Chicago society genial, polished, and well read. You find here still more warmth and much less constraint than in the East, You feel that you have quitted the realms of New England puritanism. No frigidity here; people give free play to their sentiments. If I had to name the most sympathetic of my American audiences, the warmest[4] and promptest to seize the significance of a look or gesture, I should name the one which I had the honour of addressing in Chicago.
At seven in the morning every man is astir and at work, whether he be millionaire or poor clerk. As I have mentioned elsewhere, only the idle are outside the pale of respectability in Chicago.
The business done in Chicago is fabulous. The money value of the total trade last year, I am told, reached the immense sum of 227 millions sterling. The aggregate bank clearings amounted to about 612 millions sterling. 2,383,000 cattle are slaughtered, and 6,250,000 barrels of flour received. Chicago is probably the most flourishing city in America—therefore in the world, as Jonathan would put it. I give these figures also to show that divine wrath does not seem to fall upon this city which opens its places of recreation on Sundays.
Twenty railway lines, besides local ones, have termini at Chicago. The total mileages of Chicago railroads is 28,817. Stop and catch your breath!
I do not think it is possible for a European to imagine the activity which reigns in Chicago without seeing it.
"You will soon be inventing," I said to a resident, "a machine that will take a live rabbit at one end, and turn out a chimney-pot hat at the other."